Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard. Nearly forgot to put this up, whoops)
Mathematicians are not entirely happy about OpenAI’s ten mathematical results. As it turns out, the proofs did not cite many of the existing techniques in the literature. The plagiarism bot is still a plagiarism bot. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/
“They are running roughshod over the work of others who came before them in a deliberate way,” says Steven Miller, a mathematician at Yeshiva University, who argues that OpenAI has effectively plagiarized his own research. “It seems completely systematic to me, and it points to research misconduct.”
The LLM-generated proof hinges on a particular mathematical argument that it presented as its own but that actually first appeared in a 2016 paper by Miller and a collaborator.
The discovery stunned Francesco Fournier-Facio, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, who studies group theory—at least until he “engaged with this breakthrough as I would if a human had written it,” he says. The result, he and some of his colleagues found, wasn’t as novel as it first appeared. Like a number of recent AI breakthroughs, it pasted together ideas from the mathematical literature to build a new theorem. Once again, the LLM’s trick is its superhuman patience for assembling puzzle pieces, not the ability to make some profound intellectual leap.
In particular, Astra’s key mathematical step combined ideas first found in two papers from 2016 and 2019. Andreas Thom, a mathematician at the Dresden University of Technology, who co-authored the 2019 paper, summarized the result on MathOverflow.com, calling it “creative and at the same time elementary.”
another good linkedin post from gebru: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_well-given-that-ive-lived-to-share-7491265404808396800-E6js/
Posting scurrilous and unverifiable gossip.
Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr, who posted the conversation. Open AI offered him money to take it down.
He made a song instead.
https://bsky.app/profile/valarmordollars.bsky.social/post/3msgqy34gvc2d
Personal highlight for me was the chat screenshot:
Altman: “I’m lonely and horny” Frostedjake: “as u should be”
💀
May working in the ai sector do for your lovelife what being openly republican does.
thiel’s lawyers are gonna merc him
I found the song - was a fun listen all around.
Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr
sentences that feel like being shot 50 times
I’m leaving OpenAI to start Jurassic Park A+ No notes
Mass is estimated; only Chinese weights are public.
OK that one got me
I feel like the pitch is less Jurassic Park and more Dinotopia by the end, but tbh I’m fully on board either way.
The tech-bro cult that funded Wes Streeting| Telegraph
Not sure who Wes Streeting is, but “Labour for the Long Term” and “Effective Altruism for Christians” sound like some internet rabbit holes to go down later.
Prof MacAskill and Sam Bankman-Fried first met in 2012, long before Bankman-Fried would make his billions. Prof MacAskill had contacted him out of the blue while he was still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), inviting him to attend a talk he was giving to students at nearby Harvard University.
/why/ did he do that? out of the blue, no reason at all? what did SBF have going on in undergrad?
Mr Lawrence now runs the Centre for British Progress, a “non-partisan” think tank “producing concrete ideas for… British growth”.
Not sure who Wes Streeting is
I’d say he is a shitty transphobic blairite labour politician and current cabinet member, but I don’t know how much that narrows things down. He holds a non-trivial amount of political power in the uk. There was a brief moment where it looked like he’d replace keir starmer.
sitting in a work presentation around linkedin link on agentic use levels. It’s fucking dumb. Nobody reviews shit and it seems like the whole org is getting dumber.
The flag “-dangerously-skip-permissions” sounds like something that would have come out of a joke a few years ago. I wonder what the incredibly predictable consequences of encouraging everyone to do something that has “dangerous” in the goddamn name are going to be.
just heard the term “valuemaxxing”. Kill me.
oh oh i think i learned this in calculus class
I just got hit by a memory from what must have been 2021, when I was working for a uni-attached startup center. I was lounging in our event space, when my colleague hit me with a question from left field: Would there be a benefit to cooling servers in space, since space is cold?
Little did he know that I was ready to unload my knowledge absorbed from the Expanse series, which I was reading on repeat to cope with my depressing job. So I infodumped on him about how being in space is like being in a thermos and about the Peltier effect being used in spacecraft radiators. He didn’t say much in response, and I wasn’t too stoked about my social skills in that moment.
Now I wonder if I saved him from a really embarassing decision. He was an ex-Amazon project manager who was non-committally looking for a PhD topic or maybe a startup. He quit a few months later and went into consulting I think.
I mean if he had been willing to grift on it without actually creating anything he probably could have made some decent money in the current environment, but also I’m of the opinion that those folks willing to do that oughta be sent to install that orbital infrastructure by hand without a spacesuit, so probably for the best.
In positive news, Darius has found a way to build an ethical chatbot https://tinysubversions.com/ethical-assistant/
So this one seems to be somewhat up in the air right now, and could do with a bit more verification, but it appears that google might be training gemini on your private google docs and a gemini user could ask questions that expose the contents of those documents.
Which is interesting. We use google docs at work, but it isn’t clear how much valuable ip or confidential information is in there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1vfwuf5/a_player_found_out_the_actual_name_of_my_games/
Glorious hometown W
jfc even my old company has full pivoted to ai - https://platform.mapquest.com/mcp
sorry guys too little too late
That’s probably the most “interesting” thing ive seen someone whos left OpenAI do
which stage of bubble is The Men Who Stare at Goats
The google maps now lets you use ai to imagine sat images feature already has the remote viewing part.
Look, the goat said I was having great ideas ok
Gamers Nexus has announced plans to poison the LLMs scraping them, alongside updates to the megacharts on their website.
Amazing installation instructions at https://github.com/0xeb/ghidrasql
Install with an AI agent (recommended)
The fastest way to get ghidrasql running end-to-end is to point an AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Aider, etc.) at the bundled installer prompt:
install-prompt.mdIt is a self-contained runbook with explicit verification gates at every step — preflight checks, building libghidra, installing the LibGhidraHost Ghidra extension, building ghidrasql, and a first live query. Hand it to your agent and let it drive the install; intervene only if a gate reports a failure.
JFC.
h/t to rairii: https://labyrinth.zone/objects/96478395-64d9-452c-a906-9e6159cd10a3
Worse than the cursed “curl -o- | bash” command installations. Or as I like to call it “curl prostrate”
Well, you know how everyone went from “do not trust anything you read on wikipedia” to “wikipedia is the last hope for humanity’s knowledge and history”?
